As leaders at the top of their organizations, startup founders and CEOs have countless responsibilities demanding their time and attention each day. The job requires juggling various tasks, from overseeing high-level strategy and operations to engaging with stakeholders, managing teams, and tracking industry trends. With only so many hours in a day, these executives must optimize how they spend their time to have the greatest impact.
While strategic thinking and decision-making are rightly priorities for founders, certain “administrative” activities like writing reports, drafting communications, and preparing presentations still demand attention.
These routine writing tasks are time-consuming distractions that take a founder or CEO away from their most important work. However, new artificial intelligence technologies are emerging that can help automate and augment some of this written workload, freeing up top executives to focus on work only they can do.
1. Writing Blog Posts
Company blogs can serve as a low-risk starting point for startups looking to incorporate AI writing assistance into their workflow. There are several reasons why blog content is well-suited as one of the earliest uses of these tools:
- Familiarization: Drafting blog posts allows startups to get comfortable interacting with the AI system without high stakes. They can learn how prompts yield results and provide feedback to refine outputs.
- Low-consequence content: Unlike private internal documents, blog posts are explicitly meant for public audiences. This gives startups leeway to experiment with style and voice guidance without confidentiality concerns.
- Advance scheduling: Blog topics can often be planned weeks in advance, leaving time for human-AI collaboration on drafts. In contrast, emails and memos may require faster turnarounds.
- Regular publishing: Most companies maintain a consistent blog publishing schedule (e.g. monthly). This repetitive task is ideal for AI to automate recurring drafts and free up executive time.
- Measurable impact: By tracking metrics like blog readership and social sharing, CEOs can quickly gauge if the AI is helping produce engaging, useful content that moves the business forward.
Starting with blog writing allows startups to become comfortable partners with an AI assistant in a low-risk content domain before expanding usage to other mission-critical communications and documents.
2. Email Writing
Once startups have experience partnering with their AI on blog content, they can look to automate routine email communication. As with blogging, certain types of emails are well-suited for initial AI-drafting trials:
- Internal updates: Periodic staff updates or departmental reports can follow a templated format tailored to the AI model. This allows for batch drafting of regular informative emails.
- Boilerplate messages: “Out of office” replies, onboarding emails and other messages sent frequently through auto-response rules are ideal for AI pre-drafting.
- Calendar invites: Setting up meetings, events, and other calendar items involves templated emails that an AI can quickly populate after a few examples.
- Request acknowledgments: Brief confirmation emails responding to TPS reports or RFP submissions are straightforward for an AI to generate.
- Distribution lists: Some emails like newsletters or sales alerts go to large audiences and can benefit from AI-assisted drafting at scale.
As with blogging, starting with these lower-risk email categories lets startup owners gain proficiency in partnering with their AI before moving to more sensitive correspondence. Over time, the AI is likely able to take on more complex, individualized emails. With practice, AI can become a highly productive email drafting companion.
3. Copywriting
In addition to blog posts and emails, AI assistants can be useful for various copywriting jobs that CEOs and their teams handle. Some examples include:
- Website content drafting: AI can produce first drafts of pages like About Us, services descriptions, and product overviews based on templates and examples.
- Social media post generation: By analyzing past top-performing social updates, the AI can suggest fresh angles and draft new posts on a consistent cadence.
- Ad copywriting: Whether it’s search, display, or direct response – AI can quickly turn headlines, product facts, and value props into multiple drafts for review.
- Newsletter content: AI is well-suited to draft repetitive internal or external newsletter content sections on schedule with minimal oversight.
- Product descriptions: Startups in the e-commerce space can use AI to craft compelling product descriptions for their sites and online stores.
Leveraging AI in these copywriting domains streamlines repetitive content production so human writers can focus their creative skills where AI support falls short. It also ensures messaging consistency across all company communications.
4. Creating Video Scripts
Besides written content, AI tools show promise for assisting with video scripts. Some ways CEOs are finding AI helpful include:
- Explainer video scripts: AI excels at drafting scripts for tutorials, product demonstrations, or onboarding videos following a clear structure.
- Interview scripts: By analyzing transcripts of past executive interviews, AI can suggest questions and potential answers for new discussion-based videos.
- Promotional video scripts: AI demonstrates an ability to craft script ideas for marketing, recruitment, or announcement videos based on target messaging and previous successful video scripts.
- Script formatting: Whether for storyboards or subtitling purposes, AI understands video script formatting conventions and can properly structure multi-scene, multi-character scripts.
Leveraging AI for initial video scripting allows CEOs and video teams to focus on the creative/production aspects while ensuring messaging consistency. AI handles routine first drafts at scale.
5. Crafting Press Releases
Press releases are an important way for companies to communicate news and announcements to the media. Leveraging AI can help streamline the press release drafting process:
- Generating headlines: By analyzing successful headlines from past press releases, AI can suggest compelling headline options centered around the key announcement points.
- Quote drafting: For any spokesperson quotes needed, AI drafts attributions based on style guides and may offer rough quote text for review by the quoted executive.
- Tone and voice: With training on the company’s communication voice and tone, AI drafts will reflect the proper perspective, vocabulary, and level of formality for the target audience.
- Fact-checking: Many AI writing tools perform consistency checks to ensure any details, figures, dates, or names referenced in the draft align with internal sources and brand guidelines.
- Iterative editing: AI facilitates rapid redrafting of press releases in response to any feedback, ensuring the most polished version reaches journalists quickly.
Leveraging AI in this way allows PR/communications teams to focus on outreach strategy while ensuring draft quality and consistency across press releases over time.
Conclusion
As startups look to stretch their resources and boost productivity, AI writing assistants present an appealing solution. While AI tools can’t replace human creativity, they can take on mundane writing tasks at scale. This allows startup founders and their small teams to focus on higher-level strategic work.
Leveraging AI for routine blog content, social media posts, website updates, product descriptions, and other repetitive writing tasks helps ensure messaging consistency across communication channels. It also facilitates rapid iteration and testing of new ideas.
While startups still need humans to inject personality, solve complex problems, and make judgment calls, AI writing tools lighten the load. This lets startups concentrate their limited time and capital where it matters most – building great products and forging meaningful customer connections.